How to design airport advertising

An airport is the only place in outdoor advertising where you know exactly how far away your reader is standing, at what height, under what light, and for how long. A hoarding designer guesses all four. A terminal designer is told. So the craft question here is never the size of the panel. It is which zone it hangs in, because a security tray and a baggage belt are two different media that happen to be in the same building.

Write to the dwell time

Walk the building as a passenger and the copy length writes itself.

The kerb and the entry. Seconds, on foot, carrying bags, looking for a gate number. A name and a category. Nothing more.

The check-in and security queues. Two to fifteen minutes, standing, facing forward, bored, with nothing to read. A tall panel at eye level can carry a headline and three lines under it. This is the best position in the building for a business that needs to explain something.

The tray at the scanner. Held in both hands at reading distance for perhaps twenty seconds. That is a print piece, not a poster, and print quality shows. The phone is inside the tray, so nothing on it can be acted on until later.

The hold area and the gates. Long, seated, relaxed dwell, and heavy competition from the shops and from the phone.

The baggage belt. Several minutes, standing, staring at a loop of suitcases, with the phone just back on the network. The most captive reader in Indian advertising. A belt panel can carry a full paragraph and be read.

The corridors and travelators. Walked at pace by people who are late. Three words per panel, and a series of panels rather than one, because they will pass six of them.

The room is lit, and that changes the file

Almost all terminal media is backlit or on a screen, under even indoor light, with no weather and no night version to worry about. That sounds easier than a hoarding. It is different.

On a lightbox, dark areas glow rather than sit flat, and saturated colours go further than they do in print. Fine reverse type blooms until the counters of the letters close up. Set the type heavier than you would for paper and avoid hairline rules. Ask the media owner for a photograph of an existing panel in that exact position, lit, at night, rather than a rendering.

Glass is the other thing nobody checks. Terminal panels sit opposite windows and polished floors, and a dark artwork behind glass turns into a mirror of the corridor at certain hours. A panel that has been photographed only at ten in the morning has not been photographed.

Who is standing there, and what they do not know

Departures is mostly people who live in the city. Arrivals is mostly people who do not.

So an arrivals panel cannot use a landmark, a locality name or a joke that needs local knowledge. "Opposite the Forum in Koramangala" means nothing to somebody who has landed from Guwahati and will be in a cab in ten minutes. A hotel, a hospital taking patients from other states or a car rental firm gives the name and the one thing that matters. The phone does the rest.

Departures can be local. The same corporate flyer passes that check-in hall every week for a quarter, which is the only reason a series works. Five panels over three months are read as five by that person, and as one by everybody else.

Neither audience wants to be shouted at. The terminal is a finished, expensive, quiet retail environment and your panel hangs beside duty-free. Artwork that would look bold on Mysore Road looks cheap there. The competition is not the other advertisers. It is the shops.

Hold the series together with one thing

A terminal buy is usually several panels in several zones, and the passenger meets them out of order, minutes apart, while walking. If each one is a separate design, you have bought four advertisers instead of one.

Pick a single element that survives every crop and every word count, and repeat it without variation. A colour field. A photograph shot the same way. The brand lock-up in the same corner at the same proportion of the panel. Everything else changes with the zone.

The one thing not to repeat is the headline. A passenger who reads the same six words at security, at the gate and again at the belt has not been persuaded three times. They have been made to wait for the same sentence.

When the terminal is the wrong place for your artwork

If your proposition needs a demonstration, a price comparison or a diagram, none of this works, whatever the dwell time. People in an airport read; they do not study. A manufacturer selling a machine on its specifications is better served by a trade magazine and a stand at an exhibition.

And if the panel is your only campaign, skip it. Airport media introduces a name to people who will meet it again somewhere else. With nothing else running, the meeting never happens.

A worked example

A multi-speciality hospital in Bengaluru that takes patients from the north east and from the Gulf buys two positions for a quarter.

At the baggage belt in arrivals it runs a panel with a whole paragraph on it. The departments, the international patient desk, a WhatsApp number and a QR code the size of a hand. The passenger is standing still with a phone that has just found the network, so the code gets used.

In the departures security queue it runs a different artwork: one line about health checks, the hospital name, and no number at all. Every phone in that queue is in a plastic tray.

Same quarter, same brand, two pieces of work. Kempegowda International Airport is about forty kilometres from our office in Nagarbhavi. So before either file is approved we ask the media owner for a photograph taken where the passenger stands, at eye level, lit.

What to do next

Get the zone name for every site in the deck, then write the word count for each one on the plan before you brief a designer. If a single artwork is being proposed for four different zones, that is one file doing the work of four, and three of them will be wrong. To have the plan and the artwork brief written together, book the free audit and bring the media owner's deck.